• Acknowledgments


• Preface


• Introduction: Becoming a Model Millet


• 1. Lessons in Imperial Citizenship


• 2. On the Streets and in the Synagogue: Celebrating 1892 as Ottomans


• 3. Battling Neighbors: Imperial Allegiance and Politicized Violence


• 4. Contest and Conflict: Jewish Ottomanism in a Constitutional Regime


• Conclusion: Imperial Citizens Beyond the Empire


• Notes


• Bibliography


• Index

Julia Phillips Cohen is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University.

The Ottoman-Jewish story has long been told as a romance between Jews and the empire. The prevailing view is that Ottoman Jews were protected and privileged by imperial policies and in return offered their unflagging devotion to the imperial government over many centuries. In this book, Julia Phillips Cohen offers a corrective, arguing that Jewish leaders who promoted this vision were doing so in response to a series of reforms enacted by the nineteenth-century Ottoman state: the new equality they gained came with a new set of expectations. Ottoman subjects were suddenly to become imperial citizens, to consider their neighbors as brothers and their empire as a homeland.